Morrison Tape Discovered

When I was 11 years old, my father's commanding officer was Admiral G.S. Morrison. I met he and his wife several times. It was only a couple of days before he left the command that I found out that he and his wife had lost their son a few years before.

His name was Jim.

And he was the lead singer of a rock band.

It was called The Doors.

You may have heard of them.

And now there has been a new videotape found of him, the earliest known tape of Jim Morrison. It dates to before he went to film school in Los Angeles.

It was discovered when the Department of State went through 1,000 films in its archive and may have gone unnoticed if Jaime Madden hadn't noticed a familiarity in the way young Morrison was standing in part of the brief clip.

"He said, 'Oh my god! This is Jim Morrison!'" said Jody Norman, supervisor of the Bureau of Archives and Records Management. "It really tells a lot about an archivists' duty to pay attention to detail."

In the FSU promotional film, Morrison is seen walking to a mailbox and opening a letter. He stops suddenly with his leg thrust forward as a voiceover says, "We regret to inform you that we are unable to accept your application."

A little while later, Morrison is in a university office, dressed in a jacket and tie and questioning authority.

"We would like to accept you," Morrison is told. "Indeed, we'd like to offer more courses, more sections, but we just don't have the space that together with the lack of professors."

"But what happened?" Morrison asks. "How come my parents, and the state and the university didn't look ahead?"

Morrison later dropped out of FSU to attend the University of California Los Angeles film school.

The clip was discovered last year among films WFSU a PBS station operated by the university donated to the state in 1989 and was recently posted to the state's film archive Web site after being digitally converted. It will air on VH1 this Friday.

Neat.